The Nation: The Meaning of Bobby

Every few aeons, the giant magnet of the earth reverses itself. North
changes to South, and topsy metamorphoses into turvy. In a sense, that
is what happened in Reykjavik when Bobby Fischer last week took the
world chess title from Boris Spassky. Russia, chess master to the world
for a generation, has been abruptly undone by an upstart. The U.S.S.R.
has long instructed its citizens that in chess (as in all things) their
strength was the strength of ten because their hearts were pure, their
Lenin clean. Americans, by contrast, scoffed at the game as one for
myopic children and old...